← The Lifestyle Practice Podcast For Dentists
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- [00:00]
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Hey there. Welcome to the Lifestyle Practice the podcast where dentistry meets real life. We talk about growing and scaling your dental practice, avoiding everyday mistakes, fixing common challenges, and building success without burning out. If you want to grow in dentistry while protecting your lifestyle, you're in the right place. Grow smarter, Practice better. Live more.
- [00:24]
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82% of dentists reported experiencing major stress. 60% of those dentists considered changing careers or retiring altogether early. That's a majority of dentists. If you felt that way, you're not alone. Dentistry has a burnout problem. Dentists consistently report lower career satisfaction and higher levels of emotional and mental distress. The solution to hopelessness is almost always taking action. Before you throw out the baby with the bathwater, I wanted to share a few ideas that can help you break through the burnout and rediscover satisfaction in your work. The first point I want to hammer home is to get specific about what's causing you stress. Burnout usually happens when we feel stuck. You start accepting problems as inevitable and start making broad conclusions. I hate dentistry. I hate owning a practice. I want to get out of my job. Stress is kind of like a pair of dark sunglasses that just darkens the colors of everything you're looking at. But instead of catastrophizing your entire career as a problem, I'd recommend instead step back when you're in a good state of mind. Make a list. Ask yourself what are the specific little things, the triggers throughout a normal day, that make me feel frustrated? Burnout isn't caused by one giant issue. It's usually several smaller things that have gone unresolved for too long. I predict that one of the biggest sources of stress you're going to identify is tension with a team member. Almost every call I do with clients, there is a person in the office that is just weighing the doctor down. If there is someone on your team who, instead of helping your life become easier, is making your life harder, that's not okay. Don't pay people to make your life miserable. Speak with the person. Address them specifically about what needs to change after repeated clear expectations. If this is still causing a problem, make a replacement plan. You shouldn't have to dread facing someone every day. Another common issue that causes burnout is continuing to treat patients that you don't like or doing treatment that you're not comfortable with. Few years into my practice, I was doing a fillings on an eight year old kid. Things were actually going really well. And then something happened. He suddenly flipped a switch and he was done. And the mother of this kiddo was Furious. She was super rude to me, to my staff. She left, stomped out, and started writing stuff on Facebook and online. Up to that point, I had treated a lot of kids literally every day. But thinking about it, I really didn't enjoy those appointments. I didn't like doing dentistry on kids, and I would get a pit in my stomach when I saw a large pediatric appointment in one of my chairs. The day after that, I made a decision. I went to my team and I just let them know, we're not going to be doing any major treatment on kids again. Within a week, my personal enjoyment of dentistry had improved dramatically because there were zero of those appointments on my schedule. The point is, you are not trapped. Decide what you love, emphasize what you love, and then reduce or eliminate if you can, the stuff that you don't love. Move away from low fee dentistry. Dentistry is hard enough, but when you're getting paid nickels on the dollar for your hard work, it becomes exhausting quick. So work smarter, not harder. Being in network doesn't mean you're powerless. You can still do things. You can pay to get your fees professionally renegotiated. You can raise your fees on out of network pat. You can present more confidently non covered services, and you can set your fees at a solid level that rewards you and your team for doing good work. You cannot just cave to insurances and only offer the cheap stuff that they cover. Look up your lowest reimbursing insurance and ask yourself, why am I still participating with this insurance company? What percentage of my patients have this insurance? If I dropped it and lost, say, a third of all those patients, what would be the end result in my practice? Every office and insurance is different. So you have to evaluate it with data and with a brave vision for your practice. But I would say that most of the time, most dentists stay with terrible plans because they're afraid. They're afraid they'll offend a patient and they'll leave and the sky will fall. I purchased a practice that was in network with almost every insurance plan imaginable. And despite that, things actually went really well. I grew it quickly, capitalized on all the new patients that were coming in from those insurances. In fact, things went so well, I paid off $400,000 of student loans in my first year as a dentist. But then a year or two after that, I started feeling that despite the awesome income, I didn't want to spend the rest of my career sprinting on a hamster wheel. So I dropped the lowest paying insurance that I was in network with. Couple months later, I did another. Then I renegotiated all my contracts. Funny thing, things didn't come tumbling down. New patients kept coming in, production kept growing, and dentistry became significantly more doable. Work less. This is our bread and butter at the lifestyle practice. If you've listened to us, you know how we feel about this. Your practice should be supporting your life. Your life should not be sacrificed to support all the demands that you have at your practice. One thing interestingly, that I've noticed in talking with dentists who are unsatisfied with work or reading, you know, on the social forums, dentists, when they're burnt out, is they swing between extremes. They usually spend years working themselves to the bone. You know, working four and a half, five days a week, rarely take a vacation. And then suddenly they hit a wall and they want out completely. So it's either work myself into the ground or sell the practice and just disappear. Both of these approaches are wrong, right? A hundred miles an hour every day, you can't maintain that. But zero miles per hour isn't going to work either. You need a solid like 70 miles an hour. We're looking for a sustainable middle ground where you're productive, you're efficient, but things are manageable. If you're burned out, don't assume you just need to quit and get out of clinical dentistry. Try first a smaller solution. What if you just worked one day less, Even just half a day less? I've watched Dennis so many times when we work together, they're working four and a half days a week. One of the first things I say is, you know, I'm not going to force you, but let's just drop that Friday afternoon and see what life feels like having a three day weekend every day or every week. And by the way, I've never seen a practice decrease in income by dropping that Friday morning. Never has it happened. If you're already doing that, challenge yourself. Take your four to three and a half or take that to three days a week. Even small adjustments like that can just skyrocket your quality, quality of life. You don't need to hang everything up. I have a client. We acquired a practice together two months ago. He was working five days a week at his associate practice. We bought this practice because in large purpose we could do a three day work week with this office. And from day one he's been working three days a week. I asked him after his first month what it was like and it was cool. He said he loves it. He's spending tons of time with his family. But the biggest surprise was the way it made his body feel. He felt so much more energy. He had less soreness, less fatigue, and his body just felt awesome. And it's true if you have aches and pains, I mean, you can change your posture and do physical therapy and all that, that's, that's great. But working less just can really turn things around in a dramatic way. Another dentist I worked with last year, her ideal schedule was different. She's an awesome dentist and she has three young kids. She was tired of working till five, coming home, getting stuck in traffic, and she's missed hours with her kids after they got out of school. So we just threw out expectations or, you know, the traditional path and said, what is your ideal schedule look like? For her, it was being able to drop our kids off at school, pick them up when they're done. So we changed her schedule to, you know, an 8 to 5, to going in just after 9, leaving by 2:45. Why? Because those are the hours that her kids are in school. At first she was worried that her patients weren't going to like it. She was worried her staff wasn't going to like it. But remember the truth, it's your practice. You get to design it around your priorities. So worked up, the courage pulled the trigger. And guess what? Her staff didn't leave. There wasn't an exodus of patience. And today she gets to be fully present as a mom while she's still running a productive and very successful practice. If you get the Sunday scaries on the weekend, or if you feel stuck, or even if you wish sometimes you weren't a dentist, that's actually okay and it's normal, but it doesn't have to stay that way. Get specific about what's bothering you. Don't just label the whole picture as a problem, but find out the individual small stressors and triggers that are eating at you and then attack them, resolve them, or at least make them more tolerable. You don't have to feel trapped. Also, if you can move away from low fee dentistry and become less dependent on insurance, you will find so much more satisfaction doing less clinical handwork, but having the same results. And then, of course, design the schedule how you want it to be. Dentistry is challenging, but it shouldn't be miserable.